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The global genealogy marketplace is heavily dominated by the United States partly as a result of the success of American firms like Ancestry.com in bringing genealogy to a broader audience. In our estimation, the global genealogy marketplace is as follows:
| Country | Percent |
|---|---|
| United States | 65% |
| Canada | 15% |
| UK | 12% |
| Australia/ New Zealand | 4% |
| Other | 4% |
Total |
100% |
A couple of interesting points can be gleaned from this table:
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The genealogy marketplace is very much an Anglo-Saxon marketplace. More specifically, the genealogy market is composed largely of Britain and former British colonies. We attribute this to the fact that Britain kept the best government records and this philosophy extended to its former colonies.
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Canada is a larger genealogy market than the UK even though the UK has a population about 2.5 times that of Canada. We attribute this to Canada’s proximity to the US market and the fact that Canada has one of the heaviest internet penetrations in the world. For example, as a percentage of the population, there are more Facebook users in Canada than anywhere else in the world.
Ancestry has company revenue of about $200 million per year. The Provo, Utah based company has spent a cumulative $80 million putting all those genealogy records online over the years. The company has some 8 billion records across all their databases. This means that Ancestry spends on average 1 cent per record to put the record online.
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To keep costs down, Ancestry gets most of their records transcribed in China (humans have to transcribe old handwritten records; there is no software capable of performing this task). These transcribers are non-native English speakers. The biggest complaints we hear about Ancestry (other than having to pay to access their databases) is the quality of the transcribed records.
